


Float Like a Butterfly

by indigostohelit



Category: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M, Sexism, Sexual Harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 14:00:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the kink meme: "I'd love some girl!Brandt and how that changes (or doesn't change) the team dynamics."</p><p>Major warnings for sexual harassment, sexism, and a little bit of victim blaming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Float Like a Butterfly

The first time someone squeezes Willow’s ass on assignment, she whips around and slaps him hard enough to bruise, her whole body on red alert, her hand going to her gun.

Agent Dahmer stares at her for a long second, rubbing his cheek. Then he says, “ _Je-_ sus! Lighten up, will you?”

“I don’t like it when people,” says Willow, and can’t quite complete the sentence.

“What, give you a friendly _slap?_ ” says Dahmer. “Well, it’s going to happen to you, so if you don’t get used to it now—hell, I’m doing you a favor, I swear. Jesus.”

The next time someone squeezes her ass, it’s Dahmer’s friend Ned, and she reports them both to her superior officer, a tall, balding, man, who nods absently and shuffles her complaint form into the chaos of his paperwork. Nothing ever comes of it, but somehow Dahmer and Ned get wind.

They call her “Weeping Willow” for weeks afterward. She tells them that the last time she heard that one, she was six years old, which is when _bitch_ springs up behind her back, following her through the corridors, through the dirty looks of every guy on her team whenever she wraps her hand around a gun, through her mind in the early hours of the night.

They say, _then maybe you shouldn’t wear such tight uniforms_ , they say, _it’s just a joke_ , they say, _it’s a compliment to your body_ , they say, _well, what do you expect in this job_ , they say, _guys are just gonna be guys and you gotta get used to it_ , they say—

When she’s reassigned, she starts going by Brandt instead.

*

Willow isn’t pretty; she knows that well enough. She’s not ugly, either, and she knows that, too. She knows what half an hour with a brush, an eye pencil, and a tube of mascara will do to her face, and she knows what kind of dresses look good with her body type, and she knows how to walk in high heels, and how to purse her lips, and how to sit down in a skirt, and how to lean forward in a low-cut dress.

*

Brandt’s next team is another group of all men. She wishes aloud idly one day that there were some more girls in the IMF, and they laugh and ask her if she wants to have a slumber party. Sure, she says, grinning, and put on nail polish, and watch rom-coms, and talk about you boys.

She gets along with her new team. They like each other. They have beers together, sometimes, and once or twice they get together for a game of soccer that degenerates first into keep-away and then into helpless laughter. No one squeezes her ass, and no one calls her a bitch. She’s one of the guys. She’s just like a guy. It feels good.

When Hite starts speaking Russian to the German correspondent—it’s an easy mistake that anyone could have made, but it costs them the mission, and half of the participants in the resulting clusterfuck their jobs—Brandt’s sorry to see them go. But she’s young, and it’s not like there won’t be other teams, other missions. She walks through the corridors with her head high, now. Dahmer was a long time ago.

*

Once when they’re away in Burkina Faso, sometime between Ned and Hite, she locks herself in the bathroom with her suitcase and carefully digs through it. Deep at the bottom, wrinkled and folded, is a pleated blue skirt and a low-cut white blouse. She steps out of her uniform and pulls them over her body, uncaps a tube of lipstick even deeper in the suitcase, applies it to her lips.

Willow looks in the mirror and her reflection looks back, her eyes wide, her lashes long, her body fit and athletic, scarred and on its way to being well-worn.

She wonders if anyone else in the world does this.

*

Her next team—two men, one of them really still a boy, one of them nearly ready for retirement—trips over their tongues when talking to Brandt. Oh, they’re fine on a mission, there really aren’t that many ways to scream that you’re about to get shot, but when no one’s life is in danger, they can’t say a word.

They’re requisitioning uniforms one day and the younger one says, “Do you need, uh, a different size? Because you’re, you know, uh, you know.”

“A what?” says Brandt. “Part Irish? Over thirty? Tall? Short? Medium? Snappy in a suit? Good at archery? A dog lover, a musician, a soldier in Afghanistan? A trained _penguin_?”

*

Willow took ballet when she was in elementary school, and in the privacy of the bathroom, she executes one perfect pirouette after another, her skirt flying out around her, poised and balanced and graceful and lovely and pretty and oh so _feminine—_

*

The next team isn’t bad. When Brandt catches someone’s eyes drifting to her chest or her ass she leans back, shrinks into herself, makes herself less obvious; she’s learned her lesson about complaining. There are little things, just jokes. She can shrug them off.

They go to Andorra, and Argentina, and South Korea, and India. They go to France, and El Salvador, and Belgium, and Serbia.

When the alert comes, Brandt’s back at base in under five minutes, her uniform sticky with sweat, her breath coming in gasps. “What is it,” she says, “what’s happened?”

Cross says, “While you were busy staring at Ethan Hunt shirtless, someone kidnapped his _wife._ ”

*

—and Willow spins again, and faster this time, and faster, the lipstick waxy on her lips, her eyelashes long on her cheeks, her toes pointed, the hoops clinking in her ears, her skirt brushing against her thighs—

*

Willow fetches coffee. She types things. She takes phone calls. She also knows the names and faces of every agent in the IMF, and accompanies her bosses on business trips. Whispers say they’re fucking her, and that’s why she gets the jobs. They’re not, but she lets the rumors fly.

She doesn’t talk much these days. She wouldn’t slap Dahmer even if he groped her ass every day of the week. She keeps her head down, learns how IMF likes its coffee, takes phone calls, types things.

She wears a skirt every day, instead of in secret.

Willow gets promotions even though she doesn’t ask for them. She’s requested by higher-ups even when she wants to stay down. She ends up chief analyst to the Secretary. She doesn’t see much difference, apart from the fact that the coffee is more expensive.

Somebody calls her the Secretary’s secretary, and she lets them. She’s okay with it. She’s okay with a lot of things.

When the car explodes and Ethan Hunt grabs her arm and tugs her under the water, something breaks.

*

There’s a brief pause when Ethan tells them his plan. Then Jane looks at her and says, “I’ll be the one wearing the dress, don’t worry.”

Brandt stares.

Jane winks and says, “You’d look terrible in green.”

Later, Brandt’s hashing out the plan with Benji and she holds up a hand. “Wait, I think I missed something. You’re saying I jump.”

“And I catch you,” says Benji, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Brandt waits for one beat, two, three, for someone to make the dirty joke. Four beats. Five.

It doesn’t come.

*

Fighting feels different. No, not different. Familiar. Like she’d forgotten how to breathe and just remembered.

It’s the kick that alerts her to it; she rocks back, up onto her toe, and suddenly she can pirouette, or she can kick the man in the solar plexus. She opts for the second one, and he goes down like a tree. The next man goes for her legs. She turns and slaps him hard enough to bruise.

Later, grabbing the phone from the table, something warm inside her blooming at Ethan’s smile, Willow Brandt wonders if she could do it in a skirt.


End file.
